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Charles Krauthammer Goes "Hard Left" and Rants Against Domestic Drones: Or, Killing People Abroad is Okay, But Spying at Home is Wrong

2012-05-16T22:30:00-04:00

America is currently in a bit of a freaking out over domestic drones phase. The mostly ignoring the murderous effects of drones overseas, even in countries like Pakistan and Yemen where America is still not technically at war, that bit continues.

A perfect example of the disconnect between something being okay when used on alleged enemies but an utter outrage when used against Americans is the recent comments by syndicated columnist Charles Krathaummer on America's rapidly approaching future of drone-filled skies. This by the way, noted Slate, keep coming closer:

On Monday, the FAA released new rules governing the use of surveillance drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles) by domestic public safety agencies, such as law enforcement and fire departments. Interested agencies can apply for expedited approval of drones weighing up to 25 pounds. The drones may not fly higher than 400 feet and must be in sight of an operator at all times. They also cannot fly near airports.

Krauthammer, who has a pretty high tolerance for American intervention overseas (and occasionally waves away Congressional safeguards like the War Powers Act because to declare war properly is archaic)went down-right libertarian recently on the question of whether drones should be come a normal part of the skies, the horizen, and the purple mountains' majesty. Because dammit, war is different, but at home, well, Americans live there.

So Krathaummer went on Fox News this week and told Brett Baier:

I'm going to go hard left on you here, I'm going ACLU. I don't want regulations, I don't want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside even the United States. It didn't like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes of using the army in the country.

To further lampshade the point, Krauthammer also said:

It ought to be used in Somalia, to hunt the bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home.

Somalia! There's the third in the trifecta of countries that get drone-attacks, but no declarations of war.

Krauthammer went on to bemoan the fact that London has a terrifying amount of CCTV cameras and generally went on a bizarrely great (given his history) pro-privacy and pro-liberty rant. He also said he predicted "the first guy who uses a second amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's been hovering over his house will be a folk hero in this country." Though he was not "encouraging" it, Krauthammer added.

Krauthammer was part of a larger panel, and it was an interesting one and in some ways was a libertarian's dream. The Daily Caller's man in charge, Tucker Carlson, also spoke out strongly in favor of privacy and an across-the-board ban of domestic drone use, as well as opposition to the militarization of police.

But there's still that fun-house quality of being all for freedoms and safeguards for Americans, but never mind these drones raining hellfire missiles from above upon people who live very far away indeed.

Friend of and contributor to Reason, Andrew Napolitano also went on Fox News this week to talk drones. He, unsurprisingly said that warrant-less surveillance of Americans is illegal. Napolitano also echoed Krauthammer's sentiments that the response to an American shooting down a drone would be a folk hero status (this is possibly giving Americans too much credit). Napolitano at least managed to drop a disparaging comment about the illegal war in Libya before he linked rhetorical arms with Krathaummer and said he was quite right to be nervous and outraged (I don't think the two of them often agree on things).

It's nice that Krauthammer is on the side of this, with his righteous and sensible paranoia Even if, as Conor Friedersdorf pointed out, it's kind of horrific that to be opposed to this kind of thing is to be "hard-left". Still, Krauthammer's thesis needs no digging or inference to find; To spy on Americans without cause is a monstrous violation. To kill foreigners without even an official declaration of war is just the correct use of such a technology.

Meanwhile, a drone is credited with the December surveillance-gathering in Iraq that lead to Turkish airstrikes which killed 30 civilians.

Reason on drones

Republicans Vitter, Murkowski Demand More Stimulus

2012-05-16T21:12:00-04:00

TransCanada Corp. is reapplying for a federal permit to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and there are plenty of good conservative reasons to urge President Obama — who kiboshed Keystone in January — to allow it this time. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana) manage to find none of them:

The reasons for approving the pipeline are straightforward: It’s a shovel-ready project that’s great for our economy. It would bring oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries, and would pick up American oil produced in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska along the way.

Keystone XL is exactly the type of world-class, private-sector infrastructure project that a nation mired in debt, deeply dependent on expensive foreign oil and desperate for jobs should embrace. Its construction would ensure a secure, long-term supply of oil from a close ally and provide well-paying jobs for thousands of Americans.

Writing in the Washington Times, Murkowski and Vitter make no mention of free markets in energy or free trade, nor do they appear disposed to believe the state should avoid interfering in peaceful commerce between its citizens and those of other countries. There isn't even a to-be-sure in there noting the concerns of property owners whose lives and livelihoods stand in the way of the world-class transnational project.

Instead, Keystone XL is worth doing because it's a "shovel ready...infrastructure project" that would boost "our economy" and "provide well-paying jobs." Why not throw in a "multiplier effect" and a "summer of recovery" while you're at it?

I recently changed my registration to Republican, so maybe I'm overly sensitive when my new GOP buddies talk like Democrats. Undoubtedly the party of constitutional principle and limited government can make real arguments for Obama to allow the project? Sure enough, Murkowski and Vitter have another big reason for supporting Keystone: Because if our government doesn't protect our economy, the Chinese will come and take it:

At least two projects are now under way that will allow Canada to send more of its oil through alternative pipelines to ports on its west coast, where it can be shipped to markets in Asia.

Chief among those markets is China, which Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited just days after Mr. Obama’s initial rejection of Keystone. There’s no question China wants oil - from Canada and anywhere else it can get it. China is already investing heavily in the Canadian energy sector and appears eager to take on the vast supply of Alberta oil that the Obama administration has rejected.

Canada is taking notice - and taking steps to ensure it can meet China’s growing appetite for energy. The latest budget introduced by Canada’s federal government would reduce both the amount of time it takes to complete environmental assessments and the number of reviewers. Mr. Harper and others in Canada’s government clearly recognize the potential for long-term economic prosperity that increased oil production can bring.

America is now in a race with China for Canada’s substantial energy resources.

I have no hope for any of the Murkowskis, but Vitter voted against TARP and gets a grade of 85 percent (an uncharacterized B!) from Club for Growth. In the Senate, he's what passes for pro-market. The Washington Times isn't exactly the Democrat-controlled media. If there's any place to make the argument that Canadian oil sheikhs in their toques have a right to do business south of the border, this is it.

Instead, Vitter and Murkowski urge the president to approve Keystone for the jobs and the China-bashing. He's already got his union cronies telling him that.

Of Course Foreclosure Settlement Money Isn't Going to People With Foreclosures

2012-05-16T19:35:00-04:00

Foreclosed-upon homeowners who thought their state governments would deliver on promises to help victims of alleged foreclosure abuse may not get their bailout. As The New York Times reports, funds from the settlement between state attorneys general and five banks that the AGs claimed would deliver "as much as $25 billion in relief to distressed borrowers" are going elsewhere:

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

As part of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay the states $2.5 billion, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of the foreclosure surge. …

Only 27 states have devoted all their funds from the banks to housing programs, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. So far about 15 states have said they will use all or most of the money for other purposes.

Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing redirecting the $410 million California is expecting in his revised budget released this week. Where is the money going to?

$41.1 million to the Unfair Competition Law Fund to offset costs of California Department of Justice programs
$49.9 million the Department of Justice’s Public Rights and Law Enforcement programs for consumer fraud enforcement and litigation
$8.2 million to the Department of Fair Employment and Housing to fight housing discrimination
$198 million in debt service for housing programs passed by initiatives unrelated to the foreclosure crisis
The rest will be rolled over to pay similar expenses in next year's budget

So Brown is proposing paying for the state’s own lawyers so they can sue more people in the future rather than the already extant victims of any sort of foreclosure abuse. How … nice for them. It’s like the outcome of a class action lawsuit.

But Brown lacks the nerve of Republican Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, who wants to use the $99 million as a slush development fund to lure new businesses to the state:

“The governor has decided to use the discretionary money for economic development,” said a spokesman for Nathan Deal, Georgia’s governor, a Republican. “He believes that the best way to prevent foreclosures amongst honest homeowners who have experienced hard times is to create jobs here in our state.”

Andy Schneggenburger, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Association of Neighborhood-Based Developers, said the decision showed “a real lack of comprehension of the depths of the foreclosure problem.”

How could Deal's plan possibly go wrong?

Union-Busting Scott Walker is Not a Job Killer After All

2012-05-16T18:17:00-04:00

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is taking no chances in the union-instigated recall election he is facing in early June. He won more votes than all of the other Democratic candidates combined in the primary last week, prompting Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert to remark:

It’s just not normal in politics for a major incumbent with token opposition to generate turnout on a par with a heavily contested race in the other party. It was an unexpected turnout bomb, a demonstration of Walker’s greatest political asset, even greater than his considerable money advantage -- the ability to mobilize his base.

And after being in a statistical dead-heat for a while with Tom Barrett, his Democratic challenger, he has now opened a six-point lead. Still, one of the raps against Walker is that his attacks on public sector union collective bargaining rights had yielded no economic benefits for the state.

Walker had been arguing that controlling government spending by making it difficult for public unions to negotiate lavish wages and benefits would allow the state to control taxes and attract business. Wisconsin’s business taxes are among the worst in the country. And according to the Tax Foundation, in 2009 Wisconsin had the fourth-highest combined state and local tax burden in the country, with only New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut residents paying more, as Nick Gillespie pointed out.

But months after the union reforms, Wisconsin’s job situation had deteriorated. Walker had promised to create 250,000 during his campaign. Instead he lost 33,900 jobs in his first full year from December 2010 to December 2011 – many of them, incidentally, in the private sector. At least that’s what his opponents claimed.

But they turned out to be quite wrong.

Their job loss figures, it seems, were estimated from a sample of 3.5 percent of Wisconsin’s businesses. However, new numbers released by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages which are based on an actual count of all state businesses found that far from losing jobs, Wisconsin gained 23,321 jobs. This is not great. But it is heck of a lot better than losing jobs. And it'll make Wisconsin’s unemployment rate – already about a point and a half less than the national average – even better.

It is unusual for a state to release these figures before they are vetted and blessed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hence, Walker’s opponents, who have been accusing him of killing jobs, are now accusing him of – gasp! – playing politics. But just how foul is Walker’s move? This is what the Bureau told the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal via email: “No, BLS does not have any concerns. Wisconsin is free to publish its data as it wishes.”

Federal Judge Allows Class Action Challenging the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk Program

2012-05-16T18:11:00-04:00

Today a federal judge certified a class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department's "stop and frisk" program, which is on track to break last year's record for harassing people whom cops deem suspicious. Last year, the New York Civil Liberties Union reports, there were 685,724 stops, most of which involved pat-downs ostensibly aimed at discovering weapons. Nine out of 10 stops resulted in no arrest or summons, while 98 percent of the searches yielded no weapons (which Mayor Michael Bloomberg says just shows you how effective the program is). Eighty-seven percent of the people stopped were black or Latino.

In a 2008 lawsuit on behalf of four innocent New Yorkers who were detained, questioned, and (in three cases) searched by the NYPD, the Center for Constitutional Rights argues that police routinely stop people without the "reasonable suspicion" they are supposed to have under Terry v. Ohio, the 1968 Supreme Court decision on which the legal rationale for the program depends. The complaint says this practice violates the Fourth Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches and sezures" and, because of the focus on racial minorities, the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.

In allowing the lawsuit to proceed as a class action, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin emphasized that "suspicionless stops should never occur." She castigated the cty for its "cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a 'widespread practice of suspicionless stops,'" which she said "displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers' most fundamental constitutional rights." She said a class action, which could cover hundreds of thousands of people (since there have been millions of stops since 2004), is appropriate partly because "the vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never bring suit to vindicate their rights." If the plaintiffs can show that the department is "engaging in a widespread practice of unlawful stops," Scheindlin said, "an injunction seeking to curb that practice is not a 'judicial intrusion into a social institution' [as the city argued] but a vindication of the Constitution and an exercise of the courts' most important function: protecting individual rights in the face of the government's malfeasance."

Last week Mayor Bloomberg defended the stop-and-frisk program, which he said is not about catching bad guys but about deterring them from carrying guns, in the same way that sobriety checkpoints are supposed to discourage people from driving while intoxicated. As I pointed out, that analogy to random traffic stops, which the Supreme Court has allowed in the special case of checkpoints aimed at catching drunk drivers but not for the sake of detecting crime in general, seemingly concedes the argument underlying this lawsuit: that police are stopping and frisking people without reasonable suspicion, which is clearly unconstitutional. Notably, the one named plaintiff in this case who was not frisked repeatedly told police he did not consent to a search, and his refusal was observed by several witnesses, whose presence apparently prompted the cops to move along. Nothing to see here.

Prevous coverage of stop and frisk here.

Cathy Young on Liberal Intolerance and the Firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley

2012-05-16T18:00:00-04:00

There is much handwringing today, both from liberals and disaffected conservatives, about the deplorable intellectual climate on the right: blinkered ideology, disdain for facts, demonization of opponents. Sure enough, such behavior is depressingly common. But does the left behave differently when its sacred cows are being gored? For a stark reminder that "liberal intolerance" is real, writes Cathy Young, look at the brouhaha over Naomi Schaefer Riley's ejection from the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Brainstorm, after she criticized the left-wing bias currently prevalent in black studies doctoral programs.

View this article.

Liberal Intolerance and the Firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley

2012-05-16T18:00:00-04:00

For a stark reminder that "liberal intolerance" is real, look at the brouhaha over Naomi Schaefer Riley's ejection from the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Brainstorm. A moderately conservative journalist and author, Riley joined the site's left-dominated roster of bloggers in early 2011. On April 30, she made a post titled "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations." The piece was prompted by a recent Chronicle cover story lauding a new generation of black studies Ph.D., with a sidebar profiling the first five students in Northwestern University's six-year-old black studies doctoral program. Riley offered sarcastic summaries of three of their dissertation topics, describing them as "left-wing victimization claptrap."

It was a shot heard 'round the blogosphere. Riley was denounced as a purveyor of hate speech. Sixteen Northwestern black studies faculty members joined a guest post on Brainstorm lambasting her comments as "cowardly, uninformed, irresponsible, repugnant, and contrary to the mission of higher education."

Chronicle editor Liz McMillen initially stood by Riley, defending her piece as an invitation to debate and allowing her to respond to critics. A few days later, faced with a deluge of angry mail and an anti-Riley petition with over 6,500 signatures, she reversed herself. A May 7 "Editor's Note " stated that Riley's post "did not meet The Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles" and that Riley had been asked to leave Brainstorm. McMillen also apologized for initially treating Riley's post as "informed opinion" and "for the distress these incidents have caused."

The conservative media picked up the story, portraying Riley's dismissal as an egregious case of speech-stifling political correctness and cowardice. One might think most liberals would agree, on the principle attributed to Voltaire: "I disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Yet most left-of-center commentators who have weighed in—such as Atlantic editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates and Center for American Progress fellow Eric Alterman—have condemned Riley and defended her firing. Their argument is that, while Riley has a right to her opinions and criticism of black studies is not racist, her post was so "lazy," "sloppy" and "ignorant" that such "know-nothing hackery" has no place on the blog of an academic publication. That's because Riley freely admits she did not read the dissertations she lampooned but relied on The Chronicle's summaries (not, as some have mistakenly claimed, the titles alone).

Is this a sloppy approach for a 520-word blogpost? First, let's turn the political tables. Suppose a left-wing academic blogger had poked fun at stupid Ph.D. dissertations from conservative Christian colleges arguing that homosexuality can be cured or that teaching evolution undermines students' morals—and based her post on a magazine's summary of the thesis topics. Would those tut-tutting at Riley's laziness demand actual perusal of such works?

Second, let's look at The Chronicle's general standards of quality in blogging—standards that Alterman suggests were lowered for Riley in order to appease the right by hiring a conservative.

There is Laurie Essig, a Middlebury College sociologist whose posts—mostly unrelated to academia—tend to be fact-free, muddled rants on the "white privilege" underlying the campaign against child-murdering Ugandan warlord Kony, the heterosexual oppressiveness of the happy endings of "Harry Potter," or the merits of an attempted pie assault on Rupert Murdoch. One Essig post decries the "hysteria," "racism," and "class warfare" of concerns about unwed motherhood, making the unsupported claim that children of single parents fare no worse than their two-parent peers when they have similar resources. Another asserts that Americans "hate black women" but love Oprah Winfrey because she supports the values of "white supremacy" (by emphasizing individual choices) and "fulfills white longings for Mammy."

There is also Dave Barash, a University of Washington biologist and psychologist, who a month ago made a post titled "Major League Baseball Takes on the First Amendment." In it, Barash deplored the suspension of Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén after he professed love for Fidel Castro, and his subsequent apology. So much for intellectual rigor: one need not be a constitutional scholar to know that a private company's decision to sanction an employee for offensive public speech is not a First Amendment issue. Shockingly, Barash's dedication to free speech does not seem to extend to Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Finally, what about the factual diligence displayed by some of Riley's media critics? Alterman—who writes that "conservative journalists specialize in attacks that ignore traditional standards of fairness and professional competence"—repeatedly makes the inaccurate claim that Riley slammed the thesis projects because she "didn't like their titles." He also throws in an aside about her earlier authorship of a Wall Street Journal column which "sought to blame women who dressed provocatively for 'moronic behavior' that allegedly invited rape." Alterman's source, however, is not Riley's column—which never mentioned provocative dress—but a left-wing website's angry recap . (Riley's actual point was that it's not smart to get so plastered at a college party that you can't refuse, or even remember, unwanted sex.) Surely, relying on a hostile summary to attack an op-ed column—which can be found and read in a few minutes—is sloppier than relying on a sympathetic summary to attack a dissertation.

Whether Riley's broadside against black studies is entirely fair is another matter. Some of her supporters quibble with her dismissal of a thesis on black women's childbirth experiences, including historical black midwifery, as irrelevant. It should be noted that Riley has not hesitated to lambaste what she regards as trivial research topics in other fields. Her last book, The Faculty Lounges—praised by Queens College sociologist and staunch liberal Andrew Hacker—asserts that nearly all current research in the humanities and social sciences is useless because it's too narrow to be read by more than a dozen people. Others would argue that specialized research enriches knowledge and may supply valuable material to authors writing for broader audiences.

That aside, The Chronicle's description of the other four dissertations from its up-and-coming stars lends considerable weight to Riley's argument that black studies programs are dominated by leftist hackery rather than (as Northwestern professor Martha Biondi claimed in the Chronicle piece) "rigorous intellectual inquiry."

Take La TaSha Levy, whose dissertation on black Republicanism "argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have 'played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.'" According to Levy, her interest in the topic was born when, as director of the black cultural center at the University of Virginia, she saw students reading books by black authors challenging left-wing racial orthodoxy. She worried that "they were latching on to arguments that black culture was the only thing that held the race back, and against affirmative action." Does one need to read the dissertation to see that Levy has no interest in seriously engaging the ideas of those odious "black conservatives"? The fact that she lumps McWhorter—a self-styled liberal Democrat who supports Barack Obama and has never voted for George W. Bush—together with Republicans does not inspire confidence.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's thesis "looks at the federal government's role in promoting single-family homeownership in low-income black communities after the unrest of the 1960s." Given Taylor's comments about "the profitability of racism in the housing market," the clear implication is that promoting black homeownership was a sinister agenda.

The Chronicle's profile neglects to add that Taylor is affiliated with the International Socialist Organization, whose socialism is not mere advocacy of European-style welfare: the ISO website boasts of standing "in the tradition of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky." One of Taylor's columns for its publication, Socialist Worker, hails the urban riots of the 1960s as "rebellions" that "transformed U.S. politics." Had Rush Limbaugh set out to create a caricature of a black studies Ph.D., he could not have done better.

The two dissertations Riley did not mention further support her case.

Thus, Zinga Fraser, a political activist whose dissertation is a comparative study of black Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan, explains to the Chronicle that her goal is to examine "the aggressive politics of poverty and reproductive health and how the demonization of black women still operates today."

Dwayne Nash, a former New York assistant district attorney who says that "prosecuting people of color took a toll" on him, is studying "stop-and-frisk laws as a form of legalized racial profiling." According to Nash, stop and frisk "has very little to do with stopping crime and has a lot to do with how blackness is perceived." Stop and frisk does raise genuine concerns about civil liberties and police-community relations; but to start with the assumption that such practices have nothing to do with actual crime—whose victims, overwhelmingly, are also black—is more dogma than reality-based inquiry. (A recent study led by George Mason University's David Weisbrud, a world-renowned criminologist, provides evidence that street stops track the occurrence of criminal incidents.)

Is this ground to dismiss the black-studies enterprise? Alterman cites four scholars in the field—Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates, William Julius Wilson, and Cornel West—as intellectuals whose work needs no justification. Actually, many would question that description of West, whose contributions to American discourse include attacking Barack Obama as "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs." As for Appiah and Wilson, their primary disciplines are, respectively, philosophy and sociology; both have been attacked by hardcore black-studies mavens as insufficiently pro-black. Gates has cautioned against excessive politicization in African-American studies and against a "fear of pluralism" that would exclude conservative voices like Sowell. That warning seem to go unheeded at programs such as Northwestern's.

Riley's Brainstorm post could have launched a discussion of these issues. Instead, the response has amounted to radicals shouting "burn the heretic" and liberals using double standards to the excuse the immolation.

As often happens, bad behavior on the left reinforces bad tendencies on the right. Too many conservatives move from criticism of left-wing academic nonsense to general hostility toward scholarship and "elitist" knowledge. And there are those who would use "political correctness" as an excuse to wink at real bigotry. The Riley affair gives them ammunition.

Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.

Can Mitt Romney Capitalize on Public Opposition to ObamaCare?

2012-05-16T17:17:00-04:00

A Washington Post poll released today asked respondents whether, overall, they have a “favorable or unfavorable impression of Mitt Romney’s proposal to repeal the federal law making changes in the the health care system.” Predictably, self-described Republicans reported highly favorable views and Democrats reported highly negative views. What was interesting was that while independents were somewhat more evenly divided, 47 percent responded that they held unfavorable views of Romney’s repeal proposal while just 33 percent responded favorably.

So does this mean that independents don’t want to see ObamaCare struck down? I doubt it, because the result doesn’t match other polls. But it could mean that independents won’t support Mitt Romney in repealing the law.

Much has been made of the health care overhaul’s unpopularity amongst independents, so if independents really had shifted to favor the law, that would be big news. But there’s not much reason to think that’s the case. Most polls have consistently shown that between 35 and 40 percent of independents support the law. The most recent edition of the Kaiser health tracking poll, a monthly survey of views on health policy, reported in April that just 39 percent of independents support the law. There are swings in support — in January, for example, only 30 percent of independents responded favorably, while in February and March 40 percent said they held positive opinions about the law. But in general, independent support for the law has remained stuck roughly in the high 30s since the summer of 2010.

More to the point, Kaiser’s April survey also shows that independents have no problem with seeing the law struck from the books entirely: 18 percent said they’d be enthusiastic about seeing the whole law struck down by the Supreme Court; 34 percent said they would be satisfied with that result, though not enthusiastic. That’s 52 percent of independents who would be basically pleased with seeing the entire law struck down, compared with just 42 percent who said they would be either disappointed or angry. This is not a group of people either generally supportive of the health law or broadly opposed to the possibility that it might be taken down.

So what gives? Obviously there’s no way to be sure, but the Post’s poll frames the question in a slightly odd way. Rather than ask about support for the law, or generalized support for repeal, it asks respondents for their impression of “Mitt Romney’s proposals to repeal the federal law making changes in the health care system.” My guess is that framing it as “Mitt Romney’s plan” makes it less appealing, especially since we already know that Romney is running slightly behind Obama in terms of overall approval on health care issues.

The upshot here isn’t that independents suddenly don’t oppose ObamaCare. It’s that Mitt Romney may not be able to capitalize on longstanding opposition to the law by those who consider themselves independents.

Thanks to Scott Winship of Brookings for pointing out the Post’s survey question.

Government Lawyer Concedes There's No Way To Escape the No-Fly List

2012-05-16T17:13:00-04:00

The American Civil Liberties Union is currently in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals representing a group of Americans and legal U.S. residents who believe they're on government watch lists, including the no-fly list, and want to find out why. Just as important, they want access to a means of getting off those lists. As it is, the goverment's redress procedures are a little opaque, including the warning, "Because the contents of the consolidated terrorist watchlist are derived from classified and sensitive law enforcement and intelligence information, the [Terrorist Screening Center] cannot confirm or deny whether an individual is on the watchlist." The ACLU is looking for something a tad more informative and effective to help people who'd like to know why federal officials won't let them onto airplanes and what they can do about it.

The ACLU blog reports this interesting exchange in the course of arguments this past Friday:

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski had a simple question for the government attorney: what would you do if you found yourself on the No Fly List? After some hemming and hawing, the attorney said that he would seek “redress” from the Department of Homeland Security – even though DHS does not place people on the No Fly list and has no authority to remove them (that’s the FBI’s job). Because, the lawyer conceded, DHS would not be able to confirm or deny whether he was on the list, he would then seek review in a federal appellate court. And what would the court be able to do?, asked Judge Kozinski. Not much, said the government lawyer. In fact, the lawyer would not even concede that a federal court possessed the authority to order someone removed from the No Fly List.

Invoking Kafka tends to draw the oh-so-jaded cliché police, but it seems appropriate enough here. As the ACLU's Ben Wizner notes, "The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment doesn’t have very many words, but if those words are to retain their meaning, the Ninth Circuit will have to put a check on the government’s ability to blacklist its citizens without recourse."

Tax Revolt Italian-Style, Ron Paul Urges Supporters To Play Nice, Marijuana Wins in Oregon AG Race: P.M. Links

2012-05-16T16:30:00-04:00

Offices of Equitalia, Italy's version of the IRS, have been hit with attacks including firebombings. The government is considering deploying the army, which should certainly calm the opposition.
His eye on the Republican National Convention, Ron Paul urges his supporters to rein-in their contempt for the GOP establishment. Manners, kids.
With Greece floundering politically and economicallly, pundits have coined the amazingly awkward term "Grexit" to describe the country's anticipated departure from the eurozone. The Portuguese insist, no way, no how, will they be next.
In the disciplinary hearing of Regina Tasca, a New Jersey police officer suspended for intervening in the beating two colleagues were giving an emotionally disturbed man, one of the cops she pulled away described her actions as "assault." Despite her ordeal, Tasca doesn't regret her good deed.
The ACLU warned the State Department that firing Peter Van Buren, an employee suspended for criticizing reconstruction efforts in Iraq, would violate constitutional free-speech guarantees.
SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule received final approval to dock with the International Space Station after its scheduled Saturday launch.
Former Oregon Court of Appeals judge Ellen Rosenblum, a supporter of medical marijuana, won the Democratic primary race for attorney general of Oregon, in a race in which marijuana policy featured prominently.

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Ronald Bailey on Rule of Law in China

2012-05-16T16:30:00-04:00

The fall of a Communist princeling and the jailing of a blind pauper suggest that China remains a "natural state" arbitrarily ruled by an elite that plunders the wealth its citizens produce. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey finds not much hope that China is transitioning to an open society governed by the rule of law, making its future prospects dim.

View this article.

China Needs the Rule of Law

2012-05-16T16:30:00-04:00

Is China on the verge of embracing the rule of law? After all, Chinese officials are asserting that they will impartially apply the law to both Bo Xilai, a fallen Communist Party princeling accused of corruption, and human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who has just escaped years of house arrest by local police.

The brilliant analytical framework devised by economics Nobelist Douglass North, University of Maryland economist John Joseph Wallis, and Stanford University political scientist Barry Weingast in their 2009 book Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History suggests that hope for a speedy Chinese adoption of the rule of law is unfortunately premature.

In Violence and Social Orders, North and his colleagues delineate a critical distinction between what they call “natural states” and “open access orders.” They also look at the history of how a few societies toward the end of the 18th century began the transition from natural to open access.

In their typology, natural states are ruled by a coalition of elites who control access to political power and economic resources. No significant organizations exist independent of the state and access to business, religious, military, and administrative organizations is limited to members of the elite coalition. Personal relationships is how power gets allocated among the members of the coalition. In fact, the idea of elite personal networks of influence and reciprocal obligation is neatly captured by the Chinese word guanxi.

Natural states are organized as patron-client networks in which elite patrons offer protection and channel resources to clients in exchange for their loyalty and support should intra-elite violence break out. Elite coalitions contain violence among non-elites because peace maximizes returns on the resource monopolies they own. Violence breaks out whenever members of an elite coalition think they have more to gain by defecting from the coalition. “Most economies still today," North states, "are natural states.”

In the late 18th century some societies began to transition to open access orders in which enduring organizations exist independently of the state, e.g., formal political parties, advocacy groups, and corporations. The organizations operate under the rule of law. The rule of law means that all persons, institutions, and entities—public and private—including the state itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated. In the transition to open access orders, subjects become citizens.

The elite coalition that rules China is, of course, the Communist Party. The top organization of that elite coalition is the Politburo and the tip top center of power is the nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo that oversees day-to-day administration. According to Brookings Institution analyst Cheng Li, there are currently two factions vying for power in the Politburo. One is comprised of the protégés of former President Jiang Zemin and the other is headed up by current President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. The deposed Bo was a member of the Jiang faction. Bo is the son of Bo Yibo, an ally of Deng Xiaoping. Deng reversed Mao Tse-tung’s destructive Cultural Revolution and launched the current drive toward modernization. Many other scions of former Communist revolutionary leaders, known as “princelings,” are part of the Jiang faction.

Later this year, China will undergo its once-in-a-decade leadership transition at the 18th National Party Congress. Bo was seeking to be elevated to the powerful nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo. Bo had achieved great notoriety and some popularity as the party leader of the inland city of Chongqing by building vast public works projects, launching a crime crackdown, and promoting leftist nostalgia by reviving Maoist themes and songs. Bo’s wife Gu Kailai was known as a successful businesswoman. Bo’s fall from power was precipitated by the flight of his chief of police Wang Lijun to the U.S. consulate where he accused Bo’s wife of poisoning British expatriate businessman Neil Heywood for refusing to smuggle cash out the country for her. Bo is now being investigated for “serious violations” of party discipline. Gu is being investigated for murder.

In April, blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng escaped to the U.S. embassy in Beijing complaining that he and his family have been forcibly detained by local police in their village. Chen had been imprisoned earlier for helping local farmers fight expropriation of their land and suing local officials for forcing women to have abortions in conformity with China’s one-child policy. Chen left the embassy to convalesce in hospital for a broken foot, injured during his escape. Chinese authorities in Beijing have apparently agreed to let Chen leave for the United States to study law.

What ties these two disparate cases together is the assertion by Chinese officials that both will be handled under the rule of law. For example, official statements declare that the investigation of Bo is a “resolute move” by the Party to “continue to unswervingly push forward the rule of law.” With regard to Chen the official China Daily flatly stated, “China is a country under the rule of law. The legal rights of any citizen are protected by its Constitution and laws.” What, if anything, do these official references to the rule of law signify about China’s future?

North and his colleagues identify the establishment of the rule of law (initially among members of the elite coalition) as the first of three “doorstep conditions” needed for the transition from a natural state to an open access order. The other two are the development of public and private elite organizations—including the state itself, whose existences do not depend on specific individuals—and consolidated political control of the military. Essentially the state no longer depends chiefly on the operation of patron-client networks with relationships becoming contractual rather than personal.

What is crucial is that each of the steps toward an open access order must be in the interests of the elites. For example, expanding the rule of law to non-elites give elite members greater opportunities to engage in profitable transactions. The existence of these “doorstep conditions” does not guarantee a transition from a natural state to open access, but North and colleagues persuasively assert that such a transition will not happen without them.

How close is China to standing at the threshold of these three doorstep conditions? Let’s start with the third one first, political control over the military. Up until the economic and political reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) acted as a “party-army” with considerable say in determining who the leaders of China would be. However, National Defense University analysts Michael Kiselycznyk and Phillip C. Saunders find [PDF] that in the last two decades there has been a “markedly reduced role of the PLA in Chinese elite politics.” In fact, none of the current members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee have served in the military. When Bo was ousted there were Internet rumors that a military coup had been attempted. A recent editorial in the Liberation Army Daily warns China’s military to remain loyal to the Party. At the moment it appears that China has successfully met this doorstep condition.

What about the development of permanent and impersonal private and public elite organizations? The idea is that power resides in the office not with the particular officeholder. If the officeholder steps down he retains no power. First, the good news: The ruling coalition does appear to be trying to establish permanent governance organizations whose operation is not dependent on the power wielded by specific individuals. A May 2012 Congressional Research Service study noted [PDF] that “enforcement of age and term limits for top Party and State positions has brought a degree of predictability into otherwise opaque Chinese elite politics.” As has been the practice at the two most recent Party Congresses, officials 68 years of age or older will likely be required to retire at the 18th Party Congress later this year. Newly appointed Politburo members will be 62 years old or younger. In addition, all top officials are limited to two five-year terms. Nevertheless, the abrupt Bo ouster suggests that elite infighting can still upset orderly succession plans.

While the operation of public organizations appears to be being regularized, private organizations outside the state simply do not exist in China. Thus there is no civil society challenge to the Party elites. And China’s communist elite means to keep it that way. As evidence consider that China’s spending on its internal security agencies, e.g., police, prisons, courts, and censors, is greater than its total military spending. The internal security system “maintains stability” by preventing protests against the regime and stopping them from spreading when they do break out. China is clearly far from reaching the second doorstep condition required for transitioning to an open access order.

That gets us to the first doorstep condition, the establishment of the rule of law. The communist elite does appear to be trying to figure out how to regularize the process of selecting future leaders whose power depends, not on their network of personal connections within the elite coalition, but on the bureaucratic interests of the organizations they head. This could be interpreted as a tiny step toward setting up a system of rule of law that applies to members of the elite.

Chinese officials are asserting that the rule of law will apply to both Bo and Chen. This is not going to happen. No further evidence is needed for that claim than how both men were treated prior to the recent imbroglios. As a Communist princeling, Bo’s advancement was facilitated by coalitional politics among members of the elite. As a member of the elite coalition he had access to both economic and political resources which he has evidently used to eliminate enemies and enrich himself and his family.Even his fall from power is the result of coalitional infighting, not anti-corruption efforts.

In the case of Chen, his insistence that local officials actually observe the law with regard to property and abortion got him imprisoned for four years on trumped charges that he had assembled a crowd to disrupt traffic. With regard to the rule of law, Chen’s lawyers were prevented from gathering evidence or interviewing witnesses in his defense. Since he got out of prison he and his family have been imprisoned in their home for the last two years. Even now irate officials have apparently beaten members of his family and arrested a nephew on what seems to be a specious charge of attempted murder as retaliation for Chen’s escape from custody.

The protestations by Chinese officials that their country observes the rule of law ring hollow. A couple of decades of spectacular economic growth may have convinced China’s Communist elite that reining in corruption and establishing the rule of law is not necessary. After all, China has raised incomes tenfold from $350 in1990 to over $3,000 per capita today. However, a 2003 World Bank study [PDF] finds that “entrenched elites in a country can benefit from a worsening status quo of misgovernance and can successfully resist demands for change even as incomes rise.” Under such conditions, economic growth eventually stalls out unless a country transitions to an open access order. As the cases of Bo and Chen illustrate in their own ways, China is still far from the doorstep conditions that would enable a transition to an open access order and guarantee its future prosperity.

Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Another Pot Poll Out Today: 65 Percent of New Hampshire Residents Support Legalizing Medical Marijuana

2012-05-16T15:42:00-04:00

Hot on the heels of MPP's poll showing national support for ending federal raids of medical marijuana businesses comes new data from Public Policy Polling, which finds that"65% of [New Hampshire] voters support legalizing medical marijuana, [with] 24% opposed. That includes more than 70% of Democrats and independents and even a plurality of GOP voters (46/43)."

Reason TV: Outraged Fullerton citizens react to Kelly Thomas beating tape

2012-05-16T15:08:00-04:00

How Food Truck Regulations Strangle Small Businesses and Stifle Competition

2012-05-16T15:05:00-04:00

Writing at Crain’s Chicago Business, Beth Kregor of the Institute for Justice takes aim at Chicago’s burdensome laws regulating street food. As she notes:

Far from granting mobile food vendors an unfair advantage, Chicago's street food laws are the worst of any major city: outlawing preparation of food to order, operation before 10 a.m. or after 10 p.m., service within 200 feet of a restaurant and parking longer than two hours.

Kregor’s column was written response to an earlier piece by Chicago restaurant owner Glenn Keefer, who complained that “renegade” food trucks will cut into his and other restaurant owners’ profits, and therefore urged the city to adopt a strict licensing regime that would reduce the number of street food vendors in the name of preventing “unfair competition.” Kregor explains why the city should reject this bogus protectionist plan:

Contrary to Mr. Keefer's suggestions, mobile food entrepreneurs contribute to the economy like all small businesses do. They create jobs for themselves and their teams. They feed the local economy by contracting with suppliers. They pay sales taxes. And they test out new ideas that could grow into big businesses someday.

True, they do not pay real estate taxes on storefronts, but they also do not have storefronts. (Maybe it's unfair that downtown storefronts pay so much in taxes, but that is a reason to change tax policy, not to suppress creative new businesses that are not subject to those taxes.)

For more on the government crackdown on food trucks, see here.

41 Percent Say It's OK to Pay Organ Donors in Cash Money

2012-05-16T14:55:00-04:00

At long last, Americans are warming up to the idea of a market for all of the spare kidneys, bone marrow, liver chunks, and other life-saving organs that walking, talking, still-alive humans have to offer.

NPR asked 3,000 people what they thought about compensating live donors. A surprising 41 percent said they were OK with the idea of paying cash for organs.

As of today, there are 114,349 people on the donor waiting list, more than 50,000 of whom are waiting for kidneys. And there are an awful lot of people walking around with a perfectly good spare one. Like Associate Editor Mike Riggs, for instance.

And while compensating kidney and liver donors is still illegal in the United States, a U.S. District Court recently ruled that some types of bone marrow donors may be compensated in a manner similar to blood, egg, and sperm donors.

NPR's numbers echo finding from a March Reason-Rupe poll, which found that:

A majority of Americans (55%) favor allowing healthy people under medical supervision to sell their organs to patients who need them for transplants.

As in the Reason-Rupe poll, NPR found that younger people were more comfortable with the idea of paying donors.

The breakdown of approval for the different kinds of compensation is particularly interesting.

If compensation took the form of credits for health care needs, about 60 percent of Americans would support it. Tax credits and tuition reimbursement were viewed favorably by 46 percent and 42 percent, respectively. Cash for organs was seen as OK by 41 percent of respondents.

Tax credits, which are essentially identical to cash, earn an extra 5 percent approval. Perhaps people feel more comfortable laundering payments through the government?

But when the compensation is in the form of health services, the approval number shoots way up, which seems bizarre. Wouldn't the result be to incentivize donations from people who otherwise lack a way to pay for necessary health care? One explanation may be that people prefer to think of transactions involving organs as gifts (donations, you might even say). As gifts, they are part of the gift economy, in which there is a great deal of deadweight loss, but also lots of social face-saving. (Think about the difference between offering a woman $100 after spending the night together or sending an expensive bouquet to her office the next day.) But when it comes to organ donation, the face-saving could come at a cost of life-saving.

For a great piece that makes the case for calling a sale a sale, check out this Reason story by Kerry Howley on her experience as an egg "donor."

Reason TV was on the kidney selling beat back in 2008:

Three Reasons to Reject Federal Hate Crime Charges Against George Zimmerman

2012-05-16T14:19:00-04:00

WFTV, the ABC affiliate in Orlando, reports that the FBI is looking for evidence to support federal hate crime charges against George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin on February 26. Three reasons it should stop:

1. There is very little evidence that Zimmerman hates black people, let alone that he shot Martin because he hates black people.

2. In the absence of a legal justification (such as self-defense), killing people should be a crime, but hating them because of their skin color should not be. By treating crimes more severely when they are motivated by bigotry, hate crime laws effectively punish people for their beliefs.

3. Federal hate crime laws are even worse, because they expose defendants to double jeopardy (although the courts deny this reality by calling it "dual sovereignty"). The federal investigation means that even if a Florida jury acquits Zimmerman of second-degree murder and manslaughter, he can be tried again for the same crime (killing Martin) under a different label (a possibility I noted two months ago).

Meanwhile, ABC reports that newly revealed medical evidence supports Zimmerman's self-defense claim:

A medical report compiled by the family physician of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a "closed fracture" of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation....

The record shows that Zimmerman also suffered bruising in the upper lip and cheek and lower back pain. The two lacerations on the back of his head, one of them nearly an inch long, the other about a quarter-inch long, were first revealed in photos obtained exclusively by ABC News last month.

These injuries, the very existence of which lawyers for Martin's family questioned, are consistent with Zimmerman's story, although hardly conclusive evidence that he is telling the truth about his fight with Martin. But if this evidence, together with everything else Zimmerman presents in his defense, persuades a jury to acquit him, the Justice Department reserves the right to try, try again. Should Zimmerman be convicted of murder as a federal hate crime, WFTV notes, "he could face the death penalty."

Sheldon Richman Asks if Obama Is "Evolving" His Position on the War on Drugs

2012-05-16T13:30:00-04:00

Much is made of how President Obama’s position on same-sex marriage has “evolved” to an endorsement of legalization. One hopes his position on the atrocity called the “war on drugs” is evolving as well, writes Sheldon Richman.

View this article.

When Will Obama Evolve on the Drug War?

2012-05-16T13:30:00-04:00

It’s not really a war on drugs. It’s a war on people, most of whom have committed no violence or other aggression against person or property. Those who do commit violence are encouraged to do so by the very “war on drugs” that Obama and other enlightened leaders so enthusiastically support. Black markets often feature violence — precisely because they are illegal. Decriminalize the activity, and the violence goes away.

America had a natural experiment in this principle: Prohibition. When the manufacture and sale of alcohol were made illegal by constitutional amendment in 1920, booze didn’t disappear from society. It simply went underground to be dominated by those with a comparative advantage in thuggery. Ending prohibition brought alcohol into the legitimate market (although unfortunately regulated and licensed). The violence related to the manufacture and sale of alcohol went away.

Thus the violence perpetrated by Latin American drug cartels and gangs in the United States is not an argument against decriminalization. It’s an argument for it.

It’s well known that an unconscionably high percentage of the American population is in prison. We can thank the government’s persecution of drug commerce for that shameful fact. It is also increasingly understood that militarized police drug raids terrorize people every day, often killing individuals who were not even intended as targets. The American people should demand that this systematic oppression be stopped. The police have become the enemy of Americans, mostly but not exclusively members of minority communities.

The raids that end in death at least make the headlines and perhaps upset people for a short while. But another part of the war on drug commerce gets less attention. When consenting people buy and sell drugs, there is no victim to complain. So to make arrests, police need to trap people — many of them young — in drug transactions and then threaten them with long jail terms unless they become informants. Many take these deals — against their deepest beliefs — for fear of having their lives destroyed by felony convictions and time in the hell holes we call prisons. They proceed to set up drug deals with friends and family members just so they can produce cases for the cops and leniency for themselves.

Can there be a worse indictment of the sadistic government crusade against drugs? What possible good is done by police blackmailing the most vulnerable, even helpless, people into informing on others? Cooperation with the police under these circumstances, despite the duress, is morally wrong — but we mustfirst condemn the police — and politicians who back them — for putting people in this situation. What kind of society is this? It does not deserve to be called humane.

But drugs are dangerous, people say. It’s about time this empty slogan was thrown on the trash heap. Illegal drugs are not illegal because they are dangerous. Other substances that can be used in harmful ways — most obviously alcohol — are legal. Many legal activities that people love to engage in are highly dangerous. Certain drugs have been singled out for prohibition historically not because they are especially dangerous but because they were associated with minority communities. The story of the “drug war” is not of a humane effort to create a healthy, safe society. It’s a story of persecution and control — and of tax-funded largess for law enforcement and the “drug-rehabilitation” industry.

Politicians in Latin America are beginning to understand that the drug wars tearing their countries apart would end overnight if the drug industry were decriminalized. No one would be more opposed to decriminalization than the drug lords, because they’d lose their de facto monoplies.

But who patronizingly insists that Latin America stay with its destructive policy? President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. They would rather see the violence continue and spill over into the United States than admit they are wrong.

No drug could do even a tiny fraction of the damage that the drug war does. Mr. Obama, when will your position evolve?

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine.

Another Exhibit Against Florida's Self-Defense Law Disintegrates

2012-05-16T13:05:00-04:00

Two years ago, the Tampa Bay Times ran a story that has been widely cited since George Zimmerman's February 26 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. "Five years since Florida enacted 'stand-your-ground' law," the headline announced, "justifiable homicides are up." That trend in itself, of course, does not tell us whether the 2005 changes to Florida's self-defense law, which included eliminating the "duty to retreat" for people attacked in public places and beefing up the "castle doctine" for people facing intruders in their homes, were wise or misguided. In fact, if justifiable homicides had not increased, that would suggest the amendments had not affected the disposition of criminal cases, and one might reasonably wonder why it was necessary to change the law. But the Tampa Bay Times put a decidedly sinister spin on the increase in successful claims of self-defense, suggesting that the law had "cheapened human life," encouraging unnecessary escalations of violence and enabling people responsible for them to avoid punishment. Its leading example was a a September 2010 altercation at a Valrico park in which 69-year-old Trevor Dooley killed his 41-year-old neighbor David James by shooting him in the chest. Dooley had been charged with manslaughter, but the paper suggested he would avoid prosecution by arguing that he reasonably believed deadly force was necessary to prevent Dooley from killing or seriously injuring him. The final sentence said: "Whether he is punished for gunning down a father in front of his daughter in a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon will more than likely come down to what he says he was thinking in those few seconds before a man died."

Actually, no. As the same paper reported yesterday, a judge rejected Dooley's self-defense claim after a pretrial hearing, meaning he will be prosecuted for manslaughter. It is not hard to see why. Dooley and James, who was playing basketball at the park with his 8-year-old daughter, got into an argument after Dooley told a teenager he was breaking park rules by riding his skateboard on the basketball court and James intervened on the skateboarder's behalf. Here are details that emerged at the pretrial hearing, where Dooley had to show "by a preponderance of the evidence" that his use of force was justified:

Danielle James, now 10, said she remembers little about the shooting. She remembers Dooley saying he didn't want to fight. She doesn't remember seeing a gun, or hearing threats. What she remembers most was a gunshot.

In his own testimony in February, Dooley admitted shooting James. He said he had no choice, that James had a hand around his throat. "He was killing me," Dooley testified. "My finger was on the trigger. I shot."

But three witnesses, including the 14-year-old skateboarder Dooley was trying to shoo away, testified that Dooley first flashed a gun at James, then pulled it from his pants when James stepped toward him. They said they didn't see James choke Dooley. They said James tried to wrest the gun away.

Hillsborough Circuit Judge Ashley Moody concluded "there was no reasonable belief that deadly force was required." She found that "Mr. James was justified in grabbing [Dooley] because defendant had reached for and pulled out a gun to confront Mr. James." Although Dooley had a concealed carry permit and had a right to be in the park, she said, he broke the law by brandishing his gun without cause. If so, he was "engaged in an unlawful activity," meaning that under Florida's law he lost his right to stand his ground, which in any case does not seem relevant to his defense. If James really was strangling Dooley (which witnesses say they did not see), James did not have the option of safely retreating. Likewise in the Trayvon Martin case if we believe Zimmerman's account (a big if), since he says the teenager was on top of him, slamming his head on the pavement, when he fired his gun. Zimmerman also says he worried that Martin might grab his gun, but the Dooley case shows that even if Martin had done so, it could be viewed as an act of self-defense, depending on the circumstances.

One unsual aspect of Florida's law that does figure in both of these cases is the right to present a self-defense claim at a pretrial hearing (which the Florida Supreme Court ruled is necessary because the law says someone who uses force in self-defense "is immune from criminal prosecution"). That opportunity allows a defendant with a plausible story and strong evidence supporting it to avoid prosecution, on the theory that going through a trial is itself a kind of punishment and should not happen automatically. But since a defendant can get charges dismissed only by convicing a judge it is more likely than not that his use of force was justified (a burden Dooley clearly could not meet), this mechanism should not prevent any trials where the government has enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant's use of force was not justified. Since Dooley already has admitted he deliberately fired his gun and therefore cannot claim it was an accident, a defense attorney tells the Tampa Bay Times, his best option for raising reasonable doubt "is to create the impression in each juror's mind that the victim was an aggressor, that he made some kind of movement." Dooley may yet be acquitted, since at his trial the burden of proof will shift to the government and the standard of proof will be considerably higher. But these are basic elements of our criminal justice system, not innovations that Florida introduced in 2005.

To assess the impact of the 2005 revisions, of course, you have to look beyond one or two cases. There are other examples of self-defense claims that seem questionable (some of them cited by the Times), and maybe some people are getting away with murder (or assault) as a result of the changes. But in each case, you have to look at all the relevant details and ask whether the outcome really was affected by the new provisions and, if so, whether the fault lies in the law itself or in its application. (The case of Marissa Alexander, who last Friday received a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence for firing a warning shot to scare off her abusive husband, shows that misapplication of the law does not necessarily help defendants.) In Zimmerman's case, the local prosecutor did not think police had probable cause for an arrest, but six weeks later a special prosecutor decided they did, so either further investigation turned up more evidence or one of those prosecutors is wrong. It seems unlikely that Zimmerman will prevail at a pretrial hearing, but he probably has a better chance of being acquitted than Dooley does, since in Zimmerman's case there was physical evidence of a violent struggle preceding the shooting and there seems to be less eyewitness testimony contradicting his account. Whether or not Zimmerman is convicted, it is hard to see how the outcome can be attributed to unusual aspects of Florida's self-defense statute, even though the case is routinely presented as damning evidence of the law's tragic consequences.

Previous coverage of the Trayvon Martin case here.

No Joke: Stimulus Money Went to Study Erectile Dysfunction In Obese Men

2012-05-16T13:03:00-04:00

Via Drudge comes news that we here at Reason saw coming years ago. Really. Just look below.

NBC's Bay Area affiliate reports that $250,000 in stimulus funds sent to University of California-San Francisco ended up lining the pockets of researchers looking into links between obesity and erectile dysfunction:

The University declined to provide an expert to talk with the NBC Investigative Unit about the erectile dysfunction grant. In a written statement provided they said in part, "Obesity related health issues currently cost $147 Billion per year in direct medical costs in the United States..... Health providers therefore continue to search for incentives to encourage people to live a healthier lifestyle, to benefit both indviduals and society.... Preliminary analysis indicates that is is feasible to enroll men in this type of research, they successfully lose the expected weight over a 12-week period, and they see an improvement in ED symptoms."

While UCSF played coy about the ED study, they did cop openly to getting over $1 million to figure out how to get more accurate responses while doing sex surveys.

More here.

Read "How Stimulus Fails" for more reasons not to fund shovel-ready projects. Or any other projects.

Back in February 2009, Reason.tv advertised for Stimulis, the perfect drug for economies with performance issues:

Needless to say, I missed Katherine Mangu-Ward's original post on exactly the same story with exactly the same video. Read her better commentary here.

Will President Obama Commute Clarence Aaron’s Sentence?

2012-05-16T12:54:00-04:00

Pro Publica’s investigative piece revealing everything that went wrong in the processing of Clarence Aaron’s pardon application at the tail-end of the Bush Administration has brought some renewed attention to both Aaron’s case and the Office of the Pardon Attorney that handles such requests.

Clarence Aaron is serving life in prison on drug-related charges despite not being involved in their purchase or distribution. Though the U.S. Attorney and the District Judge both recommended Aaron’s sentence be commuted, that recommendation never got to President Bush, having been lost along the way by the pardon attorney, Ronald Rodgers.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s “token conservative” columnist Debra Saunders, who’s been advocating for clemency for Clarence Aaron for nearly a decade, called on President Obama to pardon Aaron yesterday:

Barack Obama has a decision to make. The president has the power to pardon when the criminal justice system overreaches. The court put away a first-time nonviolent offender for life with no chance of parole, but because the feds do not want to admit they made a mistake, Rodgers and his ilk have been willing to let a young man rot in prison for the rest of his life. The only question is: Will the president let him get away with it?

While Ronald Rodgers is still on the job as pardon attorney, there’s no requirement that the president’s pardon be approved by the pardon attorney’s office first. The ability to pardon is a Constitutional power afforded solely to the president. Unlike, say, his power to wage war (at least theoretically necessitating a Congressional declaration of war first) or his power to negotiate treaties (which need to be ratified by the Senate), the president’s power to pardon is unchecked by any other branch and rests in his hands alone.

Moreover, from ProPublica:

President Obama's former White House counsel Gregory B. Craig said the president could issue an executive order eliminating the pardon office. "We cannot improve or strengthen the exercise of this power without taking it out of the Department of Justice," Craig said.

And unlike, say, the executive order to shut down Guantanamo, an executive order eliminating the pardon office couldn’t be subverted by an unwilling Congress, because it doesn’t require additional funding or Congressional authorization.

As for the public pressure that might be necessary to get the president to act, petitions to commute Clarence Aaron’s sentence on the White House’s petition site as well as on Change.org are not doing so well yet.

As Jacob Sullum noted about the Clarence Aaron case and presidential pardons earlier this week, while President Bush granted one in a thousand commutations, President Obama has commuted fewer than one in 5,000 sentences, freeing exactly one person from jail and continuing the trend of modern presidents underutilizing their power to pardon while seeking more power almost everywhere else.

Reason Writers on The Alyona Show: Lucy Steigerwald on George Lucas vs. Rich Neighbors, Lysol-Spraying Moms, and Cellphone Confiscations at Obama Fundraisers

2012-05-16T12:50:00-04:00

Associate Editor Lucy Steigerwald discusses moms spraying Lysol on dancing teens, George Lucas building low income housing, and the Obama campaign confiscating donors' cell phones on the Alyona Show's Happy Hour. Airdate: May 15, 2012.

6.34 minutes.

Obama Bio-bombs Presidential History on White House Website

2012-05-16T12:24:00-04:00

The administration that brought you the worst Mother’s Day card since that one from Futurama has been finding all sorts of interesting ways to campaign through the White House’s website. In a move that is somehow both unbelievably arrogant but also completely pointless, congratulatory statements of President Barack Obama’s accomplishments have appeared in the biographies of other presidents.

Rory Cooper of the Heritage Foundation tweeted his discovery of the edits, which were then picked up by Seth Mandel at Commentary Magazine. At the bottom of the biographies of many of the presidents of the 20th Century, a “Did You Know?” bullet point attempts to tie that president to Obama’s accomplishments in office.

From Calvin Coolidge:

On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

From Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

On August 14, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Today the Obama Administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.

From Ronald Reagan (!!!):

President Reagan designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday; today the Obama Administration honors this tradition, with the First and Second Families participating in service projects on this day.
In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.

The additions have, of course, led to a parody Tumblr featuring Obama photobombing history.

What, if anything, is the White House trying to accomplish here? Does anybody even go to the White House website to look up presidential biographies? Who is the target of this campaign? Kids whose schools won’t let them use Wikipedia to write their history papers?

The biographies of the past presidents are from “The Presidents of the United States,” written by Michael Beschloss and Hugh Sidey for the nonprofit White House Historical Association. Unfortunately, nobody was answering the phones at the association’s office, so we don’t know how they might feel about the Obama administration’s self-serving additions.

And before anybody asks: No, James Buchanan’s bio has not been amended to praise Obama’s recent designation as the first gay president. At least not yet.

Rand Paul Endorses Kentucky's Thomas Massie

2012-05-16T12:24:00-04:00

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has endorsed congressional candidate Thomas Massie, "the next Rand Paul." Reason profiled Massie, an MIT graduate, libertarian, and executive judge from North Kentucky, earlier this year.

See Paul's video endorsement below:

Reason TV: Outraged Fullerton citizens react to Kelly Thomas beating tape

2012-05-16T12:02:00-04:00

The May 15 city council meeting in Fullerton, California was packed with outraged citizens ready to voice reactions to newly released security camera footage showing police brutally beating Kelly Thomas to death at a bus depot. Thomas was a 37-year-old schizophrenic drifter who died after a July, 2011 altercation with six police officers in which he was tasered, beat with batons, and hit repeatedly in the face.

Cpl. Jay Cicinelli will face charges of involuntary manslaughter and excessive force, while officer Manuel Ramos will face charges of involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder.

At the city council meeting, Ron Thomas, Kelly Thomas's father, called for the arrest and termination of another officer involved with the incident, officer Joe Wolfe, whom he says also murdered his son.

It was announced at the meeting that Kelly Thomas's mother would accept a settlement from the City of Fullerton totaling $1 million.

Written and produced by Paul Detrick.

Approximately 3:13 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv for HD, iPod and audio versions of this video and subscribe to Reason.tv's Youtube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

For more Reason coverage of the Kelly Thomas case, go here.

David Harsanyi on Why JPMorgan Proves We Don't Need More Regulation

2012-05-16T12:00:00-04:00

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. suffers about $2 billion in losses, everyone in Washington seems quite excited about the political possibilities. The $2 billion hasn't sunk JPMorgan (and with $127 billion in equity, it hasn't come close), but if this kind of thing constitutes a national emergency, writes David Harsanyi, we should have better sense than to allow folks who squander $2 billion on their lunch breaks to concoct the solution.

View this article.

JPMorgan Proves We Don't Need More Regulation

2012-05-16T12:00:00-04:00

When banks generate huge profits, they are exploiting the American people, engaging in unadulterated greed and, needless to say, in need of more regulation. And when banks lose too much money? Yep, they're being insatiably greedy—but stupid, too—and, naturally, in need of more regulation.

The unscrupulous can't win for losing, apparently.

So when JPMorgan Chase & Co. suffers about $2 billion in losses (probably more) via complex derivative trades that were used by an obscure unit within the bank to hedge against risk, everyone in Washington seems quite excited about the political possibilities. JPMorgan's problems prove that finance works without any meddling from Washington.

Rather than have someone point out the obvious—"hey, that's how it's supposed to work"; "that'll teach 'em"; "neat, someone made 2 billion bucks on JPMorgan's stupid bets"—we have the Justice Department opening an inquiry into the matter, the president calling for tighter regulations, Republican Sen. Bob Corker calling for hearings and a bunch of pundits falsely claiming that if the Wall Street reform bill had been fully implemented, we wouldn't have these kinds of "risky" transactions—as if we should want to stop them in the first place.

The $2 billion hasn't sunk JPMorgan (and with $127 billion in equity, it hasn't come close), but if this kind of thing constitutes a national emergency, we should have better sense than to allow folks who squander $2 billion on their lunch breaks to concoct the solution.

Unlike our friends in Washington, JPMorgan Chase paid a price for its bad choices; in this case, it cost a couple of billion dollars, caused the company's stock to drop, caused some executives to lose their jobs and damaged the reputation of the firm (though not very much)—and if shareholders don't like how their money is being handled, they can take their business elsewhere or vote to make changes. This is how it would occasionally work without politics distorting the process.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who believes trillions of taxpayer dollars should spread haphazardly around the economy as stimulus, believes that a $2 billion loss by a private equity firm is why Washington "must regulate." "Banks are special," you see, "because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole." (Banks are special. Select car companies are special. The health care sector is special. The energy sector is special. Boeing is special. Etc. You may have noticed many industries getting special attention.)

If banks are too big—and many economists I trust say they are—they've only gotten bigger of late. The nation's five largest banks held assets of about 43 percent of the economy before the bank bailouts. They now control assets of 56 percent of the economy. And big is how Washington likes them. It's this kind of "special" relationship that allows politicians easier control and offers pliable donors in return. In the end, we are institutionalizing Too Big To Fail.

Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and others argue that massive banks are incubators for crony capitalism and bad decisions and should be broken up. Sounds like a good idea.

But the kerfuffle surrounding JPMorgan's losses helps ensure that politics will become an even bigger part of finance. Whereas Washington once created an environment in which big banks could act recklessly knowing full well they would be saved by taxpayers, now CEOs, such as JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, may find themselves increasingly shying away from taking smart risk (or from hedging risk, which credit default swaps do), because any loss will be scrutinized by regulation-happy politicians looking to score points.

Now, I have no idea whether JPMorgan Chase is a "well-managed" bank as the president claims, but rather than turning banks into "special" cases, Washington should be working to let them sink or swim on their own.

David Harsanyi is a columnist and senior reporter at Human Events. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.

Did Too Big To Fail Help Make JPMorgan’s $2 Billion Loss Possible?

2012-05-16T11:14:00-04:00

Reuters financial columnist Felix Salmon offers some useful speculation about how JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion loss might have happened, and argues that too-big-to-fail was part of the story.

[Ina] Drew’s Chief Investment Office [at JPM] quadrupled in size between 2006 and 2011, reaching $356 billion in total, and it’s easy to see how that happened. On the one hand, it was incredibly profitable, with the London team alone, which oversaw some $200 billion, making $5 billion of profit in 2010, more than 25% of JP Morgan’s net income for the year. At the same time JP Morgan accumulated enormous new deposits in the wake of the financial crisis, both by acquiring banks and by attracting big new clients wanting the safety of a too-big-to-fail bank. Historically, JP Morgan has served big corporations by lending them money, but nowadays, as the cash balances on corporate balance sheets get ever more enormous, the main thing these companies want from JP Morgan is a simple checking account — one where they can be sure that their money is safe.

With lots of deposits coming in, and little corporate demand for loans, it was easy for all that money to find its way to the Chief Investment Office, which could take any amount of liabilities (deposits are liabilities, for a bank) and turn them into assets generating billions of dollars in profits.

...Taking a much bigger-picture view, however, what was really going on here was that JP Morgan had hundreds of billions of dollars in excess deposits, thanks to its too-big-to-fail status. And rather than lending out that money and boosting the economy, Jamie Dimon decided to simply play with it in financial markets, just as a hedge fund would.

Obviously the trades didn’t work out, and probably should have been managed better. But the implicit subsidy granted to some of the biggest financial institutions by too-big-to-fail status helped make JPMorgan's huge loss possible.

Salmon is quite critical of Dimon and suggests that in the end JPMorgan was behaving badly, making deals that it shouldn’t have been making by chasing house profits rather than focusing strictly on hedging risk exposure, which is the primary job of the CIO. In theory, the “Volcker rule” would prevent big banks from pursuing proprietary trading —using client money make trades that create profit for the bank—while allowing banks to take reasonable steps to manage risk exposure through hedges. Indeed, as drafts of the Volcker rule progressed, they actually became more expansive in terms of how much leeway they gave financial institutions to hedge various risks.

And that’s important, because as Noah Millman argues, it can be extremely difficult to draw a clear line between hedging risk and trading for profit. Millman’s explanation is complex enough that it needs to be read in full, but the broader picture is that, as always, writing rules and regulations to prevent the supposedly bad stuff and only the bad stuff isn’t nearly as easy as a lot of folks in Washington seem to think.

It’s common enough to hear advocates of financial regulation say that all we really need to do is put the “right rules” in place, but when you spend time looking at the underlying details of the transactions up for review, it’s not always obvious what the “right rules” are, which is why much of what Congress passed in Dodd-Frank was sort of TBA regulation that called for a lot of studies and instructed regulators to do something but left it to the regulators to figure out exactly what that something should be. If it were obvious which rules could be followed to avoid only the transactions that result in headline-grabbing multibillion-dollar losses, financial institutions with money on the line probably would have put those rules in place.

Obama Struggles, Sort Of, In the Arkansas Primary

2012-05-16T10:49:00-04:00

First Barack Obama encountered some unexpected opposition in the Oklahoma primary, with 18 percent of the vote going to anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry and 14 percent to perennial gadfly candidate Jim Rogers. Then Louisiana gave nearly 12 percent of its vote to John Wolfe, a Chattanooga lawyer challenging the president from the left (*), though the party is trying to deny Wolfe the delegates he is due. Then West Virginia Democrats awarded 41 percent of their ballots -- that's 41, not 14 -- to Keith Judd, a self-described "Rastafarian-Christian" who says he is a former member of the "Federation of Super Heroes" and who is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary in Texas. Now a survey in one of Arkansas' four congressional districts shows the president polling just seven points ahead of Wolfe, 45 percent to 38.

That's a district, and not (as I initially, overexcitedly read it) the whole state. And it doesn't really have anything to do with Wolfe's platform: Randall Terry aside, all these candidates are basically getting votes for Generic Other Guy. But if Wolfe wins the district, he'll deserve his golden asterisk in the presidential history books. Though if I had my druthers, the victory would go to Vermin Supreme.

(* The economic left, anyway: Apparently he's to the president's right on gay marriage.)